According to a report in August 2015 published by PageFair and Adobe, 15% of the US population was using ad blockers. Globally, they found that the use of ad blockers had risen 41% in the previous 12 months. It should be noted that these numbers were published prior to Apple's iOS AdBlock Plus, so the 2016 report should be even more interesting to read. The digital ecosystem seems to be at the beginning of what the TV world dealt with when Tivo's were first released....the beginning of losing the eyeballs that were needed to charge marketers. Of course, the money that marketers were charged was/is necessary in order to create the content that attracted the eyeballs in the first place. DVR's have conditioned consumers - they realize that they don't have to watch ads anymore, and so I think their patience with digital ads was lower to begin with. In addition, as digital ads tried to become more interesting, their load times increased, which lengthened the time that it took for consumers to load the content they desired (not to mention ate up their data). As CTRs declined, ad agencies and marketers came up with more interruptive ad units. And, here we are now, in a world where consumers are annoyed at advertising and want to block it.
The content providers need money to provide the content, and if they aren't successful at charging their "readers" for it, they need to do something to combat the growing threat of ad-blocking. So what to do? There is now what is called "Native" advertising, where the publisher develops content for a specific marketer and then identifies it as "sponsored" or "promoted by" or "brought to you by" or sometimes just marked with a marketer's logo. The beauty of this for an advertiser is that the ad blockers don't realize it is actually an ad, so they let it through to the consumer (or at least that's the way my own technology-challenged brain understands it). However, the FTC doesn't like the direction that Native is going and issued new guidelines on Native Advertising in December. (https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/native-advertising-guide-businesses)
Forbes tried something different and issued a message to its ad-blocking users:
According to Content Standard, "With the stick comes a carrot: Forbes promises users an “ad light” experience when they turn off the browser; users will still see display ads, but no autoplay or animation."
However, apparently after some users turned off their ad blockers, they were served "pop-under" malware that, if they followed the instructions, would allow personal information to be stolen. Yikes!
As a publisher (Woman's Day and Womansday.com), I believe that consumers should have to pay (with their own money or by being served ads), but this episode was concerning, to say the least. I don't have a solution, but I think that the topic will only get more interesting this year....
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